View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] had faced down the Soviet Union handed over to the Complacent Generation, who made mistake after mistake. Defence capabilities were whittled down. Military defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq were spun and explained away. Communist China, intent on restoring its global power, was invited to fund and run critical national infrastructure, from energy plants to […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] not to build council houses which has marked every administration since Mrs Thatcher’s; the poll tax (only repealed because Mrs Thatcher had been ejected); railway privatisation; the Iraq war; the constant ‘reforms’ to the NHS and education; the privatisation of the utilities and of the defence research industry; the PPP system for the London […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Hersh. Later, most of them turned out to hate me. They seem to think I’m part of a global conspiracy against Syria to re-run the invasion of Iraq. It’s a funny old world Liberal leftists of a certain age often suffer from horrible bigotry. It robs Muslims in the Middle East of agency and […]

Brexit beginnings

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] natural resources of much of See or 12 Keating was Labor Prime Minister of Australia from 1991 until his defeat in the 1996 election. Note that on Iraq, in 2003, Blair preferred the opinions of the President of the US to those held by the leaders of France and Germany or the United Nations […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of the subjects discussed in Matthew Syed’s interesting Black Box Thinking (London: John Murray, 2016). He offers a striking example in relation to the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He asked Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Communications at the time, if Tony Blair could change his mind about the decision to invade. […]

Team mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] today, Turle has most recently worked for Janusian Security Risk Management (which itself is a part of the much larger Risk Advisory Group). Janusian have been in Iraq since 2003. 18 KMS have even been overtly approved as a UK government contractor. For a short period of time their work included the ‘Armed protection […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] of the subjects discussed in Matthew Syed’s interesting Black Box Thinking (London: John Murray, 2016). He offers a striking example in relation to the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He asked Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Communications at the time, if Tony Blair could change his mind about the decision to invade. […]

Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How to Do It by Chris Bryant

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] Blair contributed the Foreword. Now to be fair, Blair had not yet had a chance to show his true colours; and even though Bryant voted for the Iraq War, he eventually aligned himself with Gordon Brown and played a part in bringing Blair down. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling the conversation that another Christian […]

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